In recent years, industrial personal computers have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. It is not uncommon today to see installations with rows of industrial PCs arranged in racks. While many of these industrial PCs are often designed and manufactured to higher standards than consumer PCs, they still are occasionally in need of repair, and downtime can be expensive and problematic for many industrial PC users. Consequently, users of industrial PCs will often desire to monitor the interior and exterior environments of such PCs, as well as the operations of the applications they run. Monitoring the PCs can help to predict, postpone, understand, troubleshoot and eliminate some application software problems, as well as industrial PC failures. Remote environmental monitoring, via an “out-of-band” environmental monitor disposed in the industrial PC, can be most beneficial with geographically dispersed computer networks. Such remote monitoring has been successfully performed with prior art monitors. Additionally, some of these “out-of-band” environmental monitors have even been enhanced to permit shutting down the Windows NT operating system on the remotely located industrial PC.
While these function-enhanced management appliances have been used extensively in the past, they do have some drawbacks. First of all, their functionality has been primarily limited to monitoring of preset environmental conditions. Typically, these preset environmental conditions are established at the time the industrial PC or the management appliance, or both, are initially configured for operation. However, over time, the desires of an industrial PC administrator may change due to changes in the way the PCs are utilized. When this occurs, it is then necessary to change the preset configurations. Often, it is difficult to change the parameters being monitored. Typically, the host PC would need to be opened, and the management appliance would need to be removed and replaced, or at least reconfigured. It has often been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reconfigure the monitored parameters of an industrial PC from a remote administration facility. Secondly, when the main microprocessor for the industrial PC failed, crashed, or otherwise hung up, it was then nearly impossible to determine information about the reason for the crash if such information was dependent, in some way, upon that main microprocessor for reporting, etc.
Consequently, there exists a need for improved methods and systems for monitoring an industrial PC.